Coco Chanel, "bewitched by Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage and far from her sewing studio, offers a wonderful portrait of a woman, as moving as she is unbearable, while questioning the place of love in her life and recounting a period disorder", explains Anne Bourgeois, director of "Mademoiselle Chanel in winter".
In this creation by playwright Thierry Lassalle, Gabrielle Chanel finds her great friend the writer Paul Morand in Lausanne, but also the baron with whom she fell in love a few years earlier in Paris when he was attached to the German Embassy. .
At the Théâtre de Passy, the play reconstructs through chiseled dialogues, alternately funny and fierce, the conversations between Chanel and Dincklage during the winter of 1946, in a Swiss palace where they took refuge during the Occupation.
In 1974, Edmonde Charles-Roux had revealed this obscure part of Chanel's life in her book "L'Iréguière, ou mon route Chanel".
In 2011, American journalist Hal Vaughan went further in the revelations with "In bed with the enemy, the secret war of Coco Chanel", indicating that she was agent F-7124 with the code name Westminster , named after her former lover and friend the Duke of Westminster.
With Caroline Silhol in the main role, this creation is partly inspired by the biography that Paul Morand devoted to the stylist ("L'Allure de Chanel").
On stage, the writer is played by journalist and actor Christophe Barbier.
"I took advantage of the confinement to immerse myself in the life of Gabrielle Chanel by rereading the biography published by Paul Morand but which does not mention this affair. By reading other reference works on the life of Coco, I reconstituted this controversial period", tells the author of the play to AFP.
"History has always been written from the winning side and I found it very interesting to have the other side as well. While not agreeing with what some people did at that time, I discovered a great lover", confides for her part Caroline Silhol, revealed by François Truffaut in "Vivement Dimanche".
"Gabrielle Chanel will also have been very resilient. Even banned, she recovered from everything", considers the actress who delivers a striking composition by the stylist and says she "had a crush on the writing and the character" .
The role of Coco Chanel during the Second World War remains very controversial because she is suspected of collaborating with the Germans.
During her exile in Switzerland, she brought in the Nazi authorities to recover ownership of her perfumes, which had been ceded before the war to Jewish industrialists, the Wertheimer brothers.
In vain.
Gabrielle Chanel subsequently attempts to negotiate a separate peace between Germany and Great Britain.
A preposterous operation, called "Modelhut" (Sewing hat) which will take her to Berlin twice.
At the Liberation, Coco Chanel will be arrested but released a few hours later, on an intervention by Churchill.
Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, died in 1974, in the Balearic Islands, at the age of 78.
© 2023 AFP